It’s Christmas, and so, as per usual, I’m releasing a little holiday application: Neige (Mac OS X).
It’ll run at whatever resolution you’re at.
It’s nothing special and I just whipped it up in OpenFrameworks in just a few minutes so don’t expect much. But it makes for a nice background fishbowl sort of thing, especially on a big flatscreen TV. Apparently, the abstractmachine project is moving more and more into interior decoration ;-)
In a couple hours we’ll be starting a four-day workshop using Julien Gachadoat’s Vision Factory platform. This one’s gonna be purely experimental folks, so come prepared with lab coats, flame retardants, and a whole ‘lotta patience. Julien has whipped up a crazy-but-cool server-client system for collective livecoding using a little OSC + Processing client for delivery of the code to the mothership. Should be interesting.
I love Processing Monsters, I think it’s a great idea. I saw it on Code & Form last week, and immediately gave it as an assignment to the 2nd-year students who, for the most part, have never programmed before and had only 3 days to learn the basics. Using Processing Monsters as an objective was great, as it kept us focused on some very basic functions (ellipse, bezier, shape, translate, etc) but which can quickly get out of control without some methodology. Also, looking forward to ENIAROF in March, monsters seems an appropriate theme.
I made the mistake of introducing class/objects on the final day, in a pretty funny class on fur, hair and tufts which I’ll have to reproduce in some form or other. I should have started directly with objects, as we did in the Algorithmic Design project we initiated last month in Orléans. In my experience, it’s easier to learn class/objects from day 1, rather than day 3, or week 5. Once you’ve become lazy programming spaghetti code, it’s too hard to break it off into objects. No matter how ugly it is, once comfort has settled in, it’s simply too easy to get stuck in linear thinking. That must have something to do with the brain’s natural tendencies. However, if you start from day 1, you stay organized, people tend to understand the code better, and probably can make cooler monsters. Alas! We did things ass-backwards, and the students’ code mastery suffered as a result. But a few of the monsters are fun nevertheless :
I’ll be heading to Geneva tomorrow for a talk on Wednesday morning, followed by a mini-workshop in the afternoon at the CCC. We will be discussing the role of algorithms, software, and machines in the changing political landscape of our contemporary societies. There will obviously be some discussion of code and hacking in there, but I also want to discuss the role I think games and/or « electronic ludism » (i.e. the larger context of play and algorithmic machines) can play in future political/citizen intervention.